I tried to read a Murakami book while tired and ended up reading one from a parallel dimension

If you could befriend a concept then I am BFFs with sleep. What the evolutionary reason sleep exists literally no-one knows for sure, but whatever reason it might be...Sleep...Sleep is good.

You can never have too much of it, I say, and when you don't have enough of it, well that's a fun experience too in its own right. Thing is, as much as I love it, I sure do like to avoid sleeping as much as I can, which is exactly where I have unlocked a lifestyle that is definitely unhealthy, but man does it make for some interesting experiences.

It probably started in university, if not earlier in high school. People that age aren't opposed to the whole going to sleep at midnight or beyond thing, but that is definitely the point where I started to toe the line into another day. As soon as the shackles of growing up and having a bedtime started to creep away I was filling more of the night with activity. No longer did I have to skip the ending of late-night movies and have my parents fill me in in the morning - probably the true origin of my storytelling. It was already years of enjoying 80s action and horror movies on TV til the clock struck 12 when I started pushing the boundaries of sleep.

At uni, however, where bedtime was not only lax but also the structure of education and your friends' own personal timelines, that...is where I truly lost control. Bedtime reached numbers that made sense with a PM afterwards, not an AM. I woke up at times, conversely, that made sense if it were AM, but ridiculous to be PM.

My sleeping cycle had been around the block and through the Tour de France in university, and its when drifting off into sleep took a different meaning for me.

It started when my friends from home came to visit. I am from a town where people seemed to gravitate towards leaving for the same university, but not all of my friends had the same opportunities or life trajectories. As such, when friends came up to visit and our Fellowship was re-forged, we had all the time in the world to catch-up and have fun and really do anything but...sleep.

I'll stress again, not sleeping is very unhealthy. We don't have a solid anwser for why we sleep but we at least know it stops us from being really fucking tired.

That said, some of the most fun I had at uni as someone who didn't drink a lot and never touched other substances was when I was in borderline-concerning double-digits of being awake. Everything is funny when I hit that sweet spot. Every idea was a good idea. We waited until supermarkets were open (Because 24hr supermarkets clearly weren't a good idea back then...) to get supplies to make the blue milk from Star Wars. And it was horrible. But up until that choice, yes, our tired brains pushed beyond the limit decided it was the right thing to do.

Maybe it was a holdover from sleepovers. I never fell asleep during sleepovers, either because I didn't want the fun to end or I didn't want to be fucked with while sleeping. You know what I mean, hand in the bowl of water, dicks drawn on my face, waking up in the pond in the back garden. That happened, right?...Right?...

None of us did that. I know because I never fell asleep. I just stayed up beyond everyone else playing video games and watching Monty Python, and look at the stable human being I have become today.

The drift. Drifting off to sleep is a wonderful feeling, but I discovered that grabbing the wheel and turning into the drift made for a prolonged experience with interesting results. Tokyo Drifting your mind right before sleep is not something I endorse, but I gotta say, it's a curious sensation.

Some people proudly discuss how they lucid dream, others are embarassed or don't even know that they sleepwalk, or sleeptalk, or sleepscream. The sleep paralysis demon and that whole sensation is facinating, and obviously terrifying. But me...Boy. The drifting around the corners of dreaming is something else.

Every few paragraphs I feel I gotta say, don't do this shit. And definitely don't Tokyo Drift through sleep if you're driving. Just stop. Sleep. Then actually Tokyo Drift. Because that shit's fire.

In my constant self-imposed keep-away from sleep, I discovered that at a certain limit, you're just gone. Like a Sim, your energy bar completely depletes and you are just out. Whatever it is you're doing. But as I power through I discovered, and you can still do these things, it's just...different.

That, I discovered, in my first year of uni. High on learning all things media production, wasting my student loan on every video game under the sun, I discovered that sleep is a hinderance, but it didn't mean I couldn't stop playing games.

I have played multiplayer games of Halo 3, and won...While laying in my bed, headset on, controller in hand, going through the motions. Maybe it's just muscle memory, maybe it's just a brain function underlying it all, but I have drifted and powered through and played competitive games to completion while at the very doors of slumber. The Sandman looked at me, looked at my kill/death ratio, and smiled.

More recently, I have been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV. With the new expansion out imminently, I've been trying to level every class to the current max level, and in doing so I've had to run dungeons and bosses and other types of game content, alongside other human beings in this hugely-popular massively multiplayer role-playing game that's not run by a sketch company. And I'm doing it. While nodding off, while drifting in and out of sleep, while in a state of limbo. Not quite dreaming, not quite waking.

But, ultimately, I discovered the true power of this unhealthy phenomena my sleep-deprived self experiences that I do not endorse at all.

I have grabbed from the libary of parallel universes.

This, I have discovered, rang true just this past week. My girlfriend and I have been travelling. Not in the way you would in your gap year or in an extended sabbatical, but just in a few days off, catching the train across the country to different places, just visiting. It's been very fun, playing the tourist, taking photos and memories, leaving tips and so-so hotel reviews in our wake.

With the early starts and the long journeys, I've found it perfect opportunity to continue reading. Until recently I had admittedly been in a long drought of reading actual books. In the past few months I've decided to pick up all manner of biography and otherwise relating to the world of comedy. Be that Saturday Night Live, the incredible Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, Seth Rogen's new book, etc, etc, etc...

In a Waterstone's in Manchester, however, I diverted from comic relief, just a little, and picked up What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. I have never read a Murakami book, but I constantly feel like I need to and I want to. This book, however, felt short, and felt intimate, and spoke to me on a certain level. It was a book about a writer delving into his life and work, but more importantly, stepped through his journey running and the training, experiences, and adventures he had doing so.

It's a really good book, I'm not sure if it's the perfect introduction to the author, but as someone who writes (sometimes) and someone who runs (even less times), it was a no brainer.

On the train, however, leaving Manchester and heading towards our next destination where our hotel lay...I tried to read the Murakami book while tired and ended up reading one from a parallel dimension.

The human mind is facinating. I'm sure you've seen it before, where you'll read something and hear a noise and that's what your brain puts together as what the noise is saying, only to mutuate when you read something different before hearing the noise again. It will ignore a giant gorilla because you're focusing on kids passing around a basketball. It will think something is moving just because you watched a spinning GIF for a few seconds.

My mind, under the effect of staying up long enough when it really shouldn't have, wrote What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. At least, what my dumb brain thinks the book is, already being translated from the original Japanese once.

I found myself having to re-read pages. Chapters. My brain changed the words and they made sense. The followed on from context but entire passages were original. Same font. Same space. Different meaning, different intonation, different story. Yet familliar. Yet it made sense.

Those dreams that are just a little too real? Where you honestly need to take a second to rationalise how somehing like that isn't possible? Or just a slight increment different? It's that. The phenomena described in Inception, dreams within dreams, the whole dream heist that lit my brain on fire...That is the same galaxy wherein the parallel universe created in my mind wanted to write.

My brain wrote Murakami despite never having read Murakami before, and it made sense to me. I didn't know if I was asleep or awake at this point, but it felt real. It felt exactly what it needed to be. In a horror movie, like An American Werewolf in London, sometimes there's just something that works so darn well. A nightmare woken out of turns out to be just right to the degree it's still the nightmare. Freddy Krueger woild have a field day in my mind because he's got so many places to hide.

Being creative and running on not enough sleep is definitely a rocky partnership. It's Lennon and McCartney and I'm writing Beatles records on the precipice of sleep. I just watched an episode of Seinfeld where he discovers something funny and writes it down before falling asleep, only to become unable to recall what the hell he wrote down, let alone realise it wasn't funny at all.

Jerry Seinfeld knows the drift. And the smart move to make a note of that what comes to you on the edge of consciousness. I don't keep a notepad by my bed, because its 2021. I do have my phone with me. Sometimes I use the notes app to scrawl down those ideas. Other times I just hold them tight in my brain, ready for the next day until they inevitably float away, like a kid letting go of a balloon too early.

Turns out, why even try anything when I have a mind that likes to Find and Replace literature. The most unconscious plagarism you can think of. The truest sense of re-writing something you've found and trying to pass it as your own. I feel I'm not quite Murakami, but as I read his/my writing, there is definitely some connection I feel. Unconsious or otherwise. Certainly less successful, or professional. By all rights, clearly my subconscious strings enough together to fool myself.

Or, like I originally propose in the title, it's not myself re-writing, it's just a different, yet parallel dimension. I, a man on the brink of passing out on a train on its escape from Manchester, passed through the threshold of different timelines as we entered the dark tunnelling void, my brain grabbing that reality's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami and placing the pages over those of the ones I am trying to write.

Though, maybe, I'm just being crazy. Because I'm sleep-deprived. My brain drifts through these worlds and fights through consciousness and cognition because really, it's just trying to get me reunited with a good friend. Sleep. My bestie. BFFs.

What I certainly know, though, is that you should get the fuck to sleep. Because I've discovered that emulating good art is one thing, but the real deal is where it's at. Eat. Sleep. Read. Pray. Love. Maybe not all those things, maybe not in that order. But definitely sleep.

Good night.